The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (280 page)

Had this schedule been followed, the Allies would almost certainly have scored a resounding triumph. On April 3 Oliver Stanley, who had succeeded Hore-Belisha at the War Office, received “a somewhat garbled account” that the Germans had “a strong force of troops” at the Baltic port of Rostock. Halifax noted that this “tended to confirm” the latest report from Stockholm, that large German troop concentrations were boarding transports at Stettin and Swinemünde. An assistant military attaché at the Dutch legation in Berlin passed along the same information to the Danes and Norwegians. The Danish foreign minister concluded that the Germans were headed for Norway but would bypass the Danes. The Norwegians believed the Nazis had decided to seize Denmark.
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On Saturday, April 6, Churchill later wrote, RAF reconnaissance pilots spotted “a German fleet consisting of a battle cruiser, two light cruisers, fourteen destroyers and another ship, probably a transport… moving towards the Naze across the mouth of the Skagerrak.” Churchill wrote: “We found it hard at the Admiralty to believe that this force was going to Narvik. In spite of a report from Copenhagen that Hitler meant to seize that port, it was thought by the Naval Staff that the German ships would probably turn back into the Skagerrak.”
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Actually, the British were involved in making adjustments to their plans because of a serious disagreement with the French, which had stalled Wilfred at a critical juncture. Churchill said that whatever the French did, England should proceed with the minelaying in Norway, and Chamberlain agreed. “Matters have now gone too far,” he said, “for us not to take action.” One more attempt would be made to reconcile differences with the French. If they continued to be fractious, Britain would go it alone.
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The row with France arose from French determination to avoid any move which might invite German retaliation. For over seven years they had been trying to wish Hitler away, and the habit was hard to break. Eventually they were bound to disagree with Churchill, who spent most of his waking moments trying to find new ways of making life miserable for the Nazis. One operation, whose potential exceeded Wilfred’s, had been encoded “Royal Marine.” During the winter he had studied mines. Among the various types, he had found, was a fluvial mine which floated just below the surface of water. The possibility of paralyzing all traffic on the Rhine—Germany’s main artery of transport and communications—excited him. Among the river’s many uses was sustaining the Reich’s huge armies on the French frontier. Large numbers of fluvial mines which exploded on contact would be launched on that stretch of the river which lay just inside French territory, below Strasbourg. Among the targets would be tankers, barges, and floating bridges. Winston had conceived this scheme during his visit to the Rhine on the eve of war, but he had hesitated to lay it before the War Cabinet because neutral shipping also used the river. His mind had been changed by the “indiscriminate warfare” of U-boats, magnetic mines, and machine-gunning of crews in lifeboats, all of which had victimized neutrals as well as Britons. Then and later he insisted that, as he wrote General Gamelin, “the moral and juridical justification” for Royal Marine “appears to be complete.” The Germans had “assailed the ports of Great Britain and their approaches with every form of illegal mining,” had attacked unarmed fishing boats, and “waged a ruthless U-boat war on both belligerents and neutrals.” Against such an enemy, he submitted, “stern reprisals are required.” On November 19, 1939, he had proposed that “a steady process of harassing this main waterway of the enemy should be set on foot…. Not a day should be lost.”
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Months, not days, were lost, for although the War Cabinet endorsed his recommendations “in principle” eight days later, the plan had to work its way through both the British and French bureaucracies. Meantime Royal Marine was expanding; by January the Admiralty had stockpiled ten thousand fluvial mines, the RAF had been brought into the picture as sowers of them, and not only the Rhine, but all major German rivers and canals were to be their targets. Churchill was captivated by his scheme; if padlock visitors called at the private office, one of his aides wrote, Winston would produce “a bucket full of water and insist that everyone should watch the model [of a fluvial mine] work.” The War Cabinet finally approved Royal Marine on March 6, and detailed plans provided for floating the first two thousand mines; three hundred or four hundred would be loosed each night thereafter, and eventually the number would stabilize at two thousand a week. Admiral Jean Darlan, commander in chief of the French navy, declared himself “enthusiastically in favor” of the project and predicted that it would have “a decisive effect” on the war in less than a year. Only pro forma consent of the French government remained.
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It was not forthcoming. Daladier’s government fell on March 20, several days after the Finnish surrender—he had been accused of tardy, inadequate aid to the Finns—and Paul Reynaud became premier. Though no longer premier, Daladier retained his post as minister of defense, and in that office he had the power, which he now exercised, of vetoing Royal Marine. According to gossip at No. 10, Daladier “does not want Reynaud to get the credit, or possibly… the French fear instant retaliation which they are not in a position to withstand.” The second motive was the one given the British. The minister of defense, they were told, flinched from the possibility of reprisals in the form of Luftwaffe attacks on French air factories. The factories were especially vulnerable now. In two months they would be dispersed and the mines could be launched. On March 28, at the same meeting of the Supreme War Council at which Wilfred was approved, Chamberlain intervened, and his powerful promotion of Royal Marine persuaded the French to float the mines on April 4. Back in Paris they changed their minds and demanded a three-month postponement. Colville wrote, “Winston is going over to Paris to do a little personal persuasion. We are trying to blackmail the French by maintaining that we may not undertake the Norwegian territorial waters project unless we can combine it with the other.”
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Churchill once observed: “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.” Yet it is hard to think of any substantial blow struck for Allied victory by the Third Republic. They were, of course, very
courtois
when Winston arrived in Paris the evening of April 4; the premier and most of his cabinet dined with the first lord at the British embassy. Unfortunately, the
ministre de guerre
, “the stumbling-block,” as Churchill called him, did not find it convenient to attend. Next day Winston sought him out and cornered him in the rue St. Dominique. He “commented,” as he later wrote, on Daladier’s “absence from our dinner the night before. He pleaded his previous engagement.” That was the war minister’s last opportunity to say anything else for quite some time, for Churchill unloosed a torrent of arguments in favor of his project: melting snow in the Alps made this the most favorable time of year for the mines; the Rhine traffic was heavy; if the Germans possessed retaliatory weapons they would have used them by now. Nothing worked. The German reaction would be violent, Daladier said when Winston had finished, and the blow would “fall on France.” Churchill reluctantly phoned London and told his colleagues he had decided that to press the French harder would be “a very great mistake.” In reality, a far greater mistake had already been made. Operation Wilfred, the mining of Norwegian ports, had been scheduled for Friday, April 5, with Anglo-French landings to follow. Because of Winston’s trip to Paris, the dates had been set back three days, to begin Monday, April 8. It is startling to read his postwar apologia: “If a few days would enable us to bring the French into agreement upon the punctual execution of the two projects, I was agreeable to postponing ‘Wilfred’ for a few days.” Yet neither project was dependent upon the other; French reluctance to endorse one should not have held the other back, and “punctual execution” was precisely what his trip to Paris lost Wilfred.
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The delay proved fatal. Though each was only vaguely aware of the other, the British and the Germans were in a crucial race for Norway, and Falkenhorst and the Kriegsmarine won it in a photo finish. Hankey, then a member of the War Cabinet, later wrote that in their designs on Norway “both Great Britain and Germany were keeping more or less level in their plans and preparations. Britain actually started planning a little earlier…. Both plans were executed almost simultaneously, Britain being twenty-four hours ahead in the so-called act of aggression, if the term is really applicable to either side.” But Germany’s final surge made the difference.
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Unaware of Nazi intentions, Chamberlain delivered a major political address on Thursday, the day Wilfred was put on hold while Winston traveled to Paris, ending it with four words which were to haunt him and, ultimately, to serve as powerful ammunition in the Tory uprising which would drive him from office. Germany’s preparations at the war’s outbreak, he told a mass meeting of Conservatives, “were far ahead of our own,” and His Majesty’s Government had assumed that “the enemy would take advantage of his initial superiority” and “endeavour to overwhelm us and France” before they could catch up. “Is it not a very extraordinary thing that no such attempt was made? Whatever may be the reason—whether it was that Hitler thought he might get away with what he had got without fighting for it, or whether it was that after all the preparations were not sufficiently complete—however, one thing is certain: he missed the bus.”
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H
itler had already boarded another bus, which followed its timetable with Teutonic precision on Tuesday, April 9, and at 4:10
A.M.
began dropping off its passengers—elements from three Wehrmacht divisions—at their destinations: Denmark and the chief ports of Norway from Oslo right up to Narvik, twelve hundred miles from the nearest Nazi naval base and well above the Arctic Circle. Denmark was overrun in twelve hours. The Norwegian government was busy lodging protests against the British minelaying, which had begun a day earlier—and which Ribbentrop had called “the most flagrant violation of a neutral country [since] the British bombardment of Copenhagen in 1801”—but German landings there were not unopposed. At Oslo alone, shore batteries—ancient 28-centimeter guns built, ironically, by Krupp before the turn of the century—sank the heavy cruiser
Blücher
, permanently damaged the cruiser
Emden
, and destroyed auxiliary ships.

In London the first reaction to German audacity had been confusion and disbelief. That afternoon in Parliament, Chamberlain confirmed newspaper accounts of enemy landings at Bergen and Trondheim and added: “There have been some reports about a similar landing at Narvik, but I am very doubtful whether they are correct.” It seemed unbelievable that Hitler could have committed himself so far north, particularly when he knew the Royal Navy was present in strength. The Admiralty suggested that “Narvik” must be a misspelling of Larvik, a community on Norway’s south coast. But by evening they knew that forces of the Reich held all major Norwegian ports, including Narvik and Oslo, the country’s capital. Two days later Churchill, his confidence in British sea power undiminished, told the House of Commons that it was his view, “shared by my skilled advisers,” that “Herr Hitler has committed a grave strategic error,” and that “we have greatly gained by what has occurred in Scandinavia.” Having seized defenseless ports, the Führer “will now have to fight” against “Powers possessing vastly superior naval forces.” Winston concluded: “I feel that we are greatly advantaged by… the strategic blunder into which our mortal enemy has been provoked.”
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Liddell Hart comments: “The dream-castles raised by Churchill” were doomed to “come tumbling down.” To be sure, in almost every surface battle the Royal Navy crippled the fleet Hitler had put at risk. But victory at sea was no longer determined solely by surface engagements. Churchill thought it still was, and so did Admiral Sir Thomas Phillips, who would sacrifice his life for this precept twenty months later in the waters off Malaya. Rear Admiral J. H. Godfrey comments: “Both W.S.C. and Tom Phillips were obsessed with the idea that a fleet or a big ship could provide complete aerial protection with its own A.A. guns.” A vice admiral believes that Pound “was quite as ignorant as we all were before the Second World War as to what aircraft could do to ships. This was quite clear from the Norwegian campaign, where we intended… to send a squadron into Trondheim with no reconnaissance, and with the certainty that they would be bombed.”
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